Liam Connell

University of Brighton, English literature, Faculty Member

As a researcher I am interested in the material contexts for the formation of ideas, and I try to show how literary texts express these ideas in ways that resonate with their wider social articulation. My work in the area of postcolonial studies has sought to link specific texts to the material structures of power that govern their production and to think about how far these texts work within and against the dominant narratives of public discourse.

I completed my DPhil at the University of Sussex in 2000. This work was on the cultural context for the Scottish Renaissance Movement of the inter-war years and it sought to ask why a nationalist reading of Scotland gained especial purchase during the years between 1918 and 1939. This work developed my interest in nations and nationalism, especially with modernist and postcolonial ideas of the nation, and in the material origins of cultural texts.

My current research is with the question of globalization and, in particular, how a globalised economy is represented in creative texts. I am currently completing a book-length study which explores how contemporary labour patterns are represented in novels from India, the UK and North America. With a particular focus on fictional accounts of office work, this book suggest that ideas of workers' precariousness and of generational shifts from a Keynesian to a neoliberal economy, are repetitively reproduced in order contemporary fiction.
Phone: 01273 641405
Address: College of Arts and Humanities
University of Brighton
E352, Checkland Building
Falmer Campus
BN1 9PH

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Books

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

Chapter abstracts. http://bit.ly/2wuj12B

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Cargo Excavating the Contemporary Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Plymouth and Devon

by Tony Eccles, Len Pole, Zoe Shearman, Liam Connell, Judith Robinson, and Wessie Ling

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The Literature and Globalization Reader

Papers

A Wall of Words: Representing Border Securitisation in Contemporary Fiction

Parallax, 2021

Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 it has been commonplace to argue that globalisation is in... more Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 it has been commonplace to argue that globalisation is in retreat. The period following the Cold War saw decades of international integration of the world economy, represented by streamlined trade logistics, a growing financial and immaterial economy and the formation of trading blocs tailored to ease the free movement of goods, services and, in the right circumstances, of people. However, in the last decade, these twentieth-century verities have come under increasing tension. During a long period of economic stagnation, successive populist governments have turned to nationalist rhetoric in order to justify protectionist solutions to the problems of stalled growth. Alongside the noise of tariffs and trading wars the most visible signal of this development has been a substantial rhetorical investment in the power of the securitised border to cure the political ills of the nation state. This rhetoric is not wholly empty and has been accompanied ...

The Scottishness of the Scottish Press: 1918–1939

Media, Culture and Society, 2003

"This article considers the impact of new levels of competition and a changing political def... more "This article considers the impact of new levels of competition and a changing political definition of Scottishness upon the way that Scottish newspapers sought to construct their content as Scottish during the inter-war period. Through an analysis of their content this article considers the extent to which Scottish newspapers concentrated upon events in Scotland, the manner in which local Scottish events were represented as Scottish national events, and the techniques that they employed to brand themselves as Scottish products. It concludes that these combined to position Scottish papers as Scottish ‘nationals’ rather than as local papers. It further identifies the use of similar techniques by the London-based ‘nationals’ at that time, suggesting that the tendency to address their readership as a national community is the defining characteristic of national news media in general. "

Crisis, Labor, and the Contemporary

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics, 2022

This chapter considers the difficulty that economics has found in defining labour as a practice s... more This chapter considers the difficulty that economics has found in defining labour as a practice separate from its product. Looking first at Classical and Marxist economics, it uses feminist economics to highlight the omissions that conventional definitions of labour contain, especially concerning the work of women. By comparing feminist economics with recent novels by women, including Halle Butler’s The New Me, Alice Furse’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary and Ling Ma’s Severance, it argues that contemporary fiction has been attentive to the same omissions. Through a reading of the techniques of literary fiction, including realism and a range of experimental narrative devices, this essay proposes that the contemporary novel offers kinds of writing that expand our conception of labour. Contemporary fiction contains narratives that highlight the work of social reproduction as central component of the economies of labour and that offer a wider critique of economic categories of value.

Introduction: Troubling Globalisation

Parallax, 2021

In a context in which the idea of globalisation is now routinely condemned in the name of a natio... more In a context in which the idea of globalisation is now routinely condemned in the name of a nationhood that should once again assert its sovereign preeminence, to question the purpose or place of this idea is both politically and intellectually risky. If the era of globalisation is coming to an end, it is often posited, then it is because the idea of the nation – as a territory and a population with a defined social and cultural character – is again in the ascendant. Any critical or intellectual challenge to globalisation today risks being perceived either as enabling neo-nationalist anti-globalism or as seeking to preserve neoliberalism’s crumbling narrative of open movement and free exchange. If we are to avoid these risks then one option is to look to Peter Sloterdijk’s observation that a structural shift is under way not because of the nation-state’s resurgence but because ‘we are today living through a dramatic crisis of reformatting’. In this drama, the disavowal of the foreig...

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Anxious reading

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

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Offshore cosmopolitanism: reading the nation in Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Open Arts Journal, 2013

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E‐terror: Computer viruses, class and transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010

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Scottish nationalism and the colonial vision of Scotland

Interventions, 2004

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Modes of Marginality: Scottish Literature and the Uses of Postcolonial Theory

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2003

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The Scottishness of the Scottish press: 1918–39

A recent attempt to characterize the Scottish press identified its major features as comprising p... more A recent attempt to characterize the Scottish press identified its major features as comprising primarily local papers which, by comparison with the London ‘nationals’, command small budgets and, consequently, contain a high concentration of Scottish news at the expense of UK coverage, foreign news and features. Strikingly, despite an initial enthusiasm for the fledgling Scottish Parliament, public indifference had led to a general neglect of Edinburgh politics in imitation of the ‘London broadsheets and blue tops – particularly the Daily Mail ’ (Luckhurst, 2000). The implication of this neglect of Scottish-wide political institutions, combined with the concentration on Scottish news, is that the content of the Scottish press is principally composed of local rather than national events (either Scottish or British), and what news coverage they provide is dominated by human interest or breaking news. Importantly, while newspaper readers in Scotland still prefer locally produced titles...

Kailyard money: nation, empire and speculation in Walter Scott's letters from Malachi Malagrowther

This essay re-reads Scott's three letters from Malachi Malagrowther in the context of the 182... more This essay re-reads Scott's three letters from Malachi Malagrowther in the context of the 1825 banking crisis. It suggests that these letters have a complex relationship to British imperialism as it was consituted at that time. First, it shows how far Scottish capital was connected to finanical speculation in the Americas as part of British expansionist ambitions in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Second, it indicates how Scott's letters contains a curious series of images of Amerindians that positions Scots as a colonised nation. It tries to read this imagery back into Scott's novels to consider how far this allows his letters to disguise class interests beneath a veneer of nationalism.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism

The formal characteristics of a literature described as Magic Realist are hard to distinguish fro... more The formal characteristics of a literature described as Magic Realist are hard to distinguish from the formal characteristics of early-twentieth-century Modernism; to that end, attempts to keep these movements distinct through the categorization of one sort of literature as modern and another as magical, as well the various attempts to define the genre through a series of extra-literary criteria, merely serve to codify a set of prejudices about Western European and non-Western societies and their respective modes of thinking. That is to say that non-Western societies are persistently characterized through a series of indicators which are categorized as primitive—one of which is a residual belief in myth, magic, and the use of ritual. Western nations by contrast are characterized as progressive, developing, modern. They then are allowed literary forms called Modernism, where their non-Western counterparts can only write Magic Realism.

Melanie Jackson’s The Undesirables: Visualizing Labour in the era of Globalisation

in Contemporary Visualizations of Migration

Reading Coupland Backwards: Time, Generationality and Work in Generation X, Microserfs and JPod

This chapter reads Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), Microserfs (2004) and JPod (2006) and ... more This chapter reads Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), Microserfs (2004) and JPod (2006) and examines how Coupland’s generational narrative of declining worker compensation from the Baby-Boomer generation to the present day comes under pressure when his three novels are read together as a novel-cycle. Although, individually, each novel is organised by nostalgia for the presumed security of earlier conditions of work, across the three novels Coupland depicts continuities between generations that undermine this narrative structure. Using theories of debt from Maurizio Lazzarato, accumulation from David Harvey, socialized work from Antonio Negri and fractalization from Franco Beradi, it suggests that Coupland’s novels offer a picture of presentism in which workers of successive generations are trapped in repeated iterations of the precarious present.

Post-colonialism and Globalization: the literal and figurative economies of difference

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

Chapter abstracts. http://bit.ly/2wuj12B

Download

Cargo Excavating the Contemporary Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Plymouth and Devon

by Tony Eccles, Len Pole, Zoe Shearman, Liam Connell, Judith Robinson, and Wessie Ling

Download

The Literature and Globalization Reader

A Wall of Words: Representing Border Securitisation in Contemporary Fiction

Parallax, 2021

The Scottishness of the Scottish Press: 1918–1939

Media, Culture and Society, 2003

Crisis, Labor, and the Contemporary

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics, 2022

Introduction: Troubling Globalisation

Parallax, 2021

Download

Anxious reading

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

Download

Offshore cosmopolitanism: reading the nation in Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Open Arts Journal, 2013

Download

E‐terror: Computer viruses, class and transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010

Download

Scottish nationalism and the colonial vision of Scotland

Interventions, 2004

Download

Modes of Marginality: Scottish Literature and the Uses of Postcolonial Theory

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2003

Download

The Scottishness of the Scottish press: 1918–39

Kailyard money: nation, empire and speculation in Walter Scott's letters from Malachi Malagrowther

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism

Melanie Jackson’s The Undesirables: Visualizing Labour in the era of Globalisation

in Contemporary Visualizations of Migration

Reading Coupland Backwards: Time, Generationality and Work in Generation X, Microserfs and JPod

Post-colonialism and Globalization: the literal and figurative economies of difference

Discarding Magic Realism: Modernism, Anthropology, and Critical Practice

Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 1998

... Discarding Magic Realism: Modernism, Anthropology, and Critical Practice. Liam Connell. Full ... more

More than a library: the ethnographic potential of Stevenson's South Sea writing

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;This paper considers Robert Louis Steve... more &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;This paper considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s South-Seas writing in an attempt to understand why his fiction has so frequently been read as ethnographic source-material. I begin by relating Stevenson’s writing to late nineteenth-century anthropological models and suggest that, while he was writing within a tradition of the informed amateur-observer, he also deviated from this tradition in ways that anticipate the methodologies of participant-observation. I argue that Stevenson’s relationship to these traditions combined with his own belief in the revelatory potential of fiction in order to produce an authoritative idiom in his writing that has led it to be read as a truthful account of Pacific cultures. I then consider the serial publication of The Beach of Falesa in the Illustrated London News (1892) and suggest that this supported Stevenson’s emphasis upon his physical presence in the Pacific as testament to the authority to his accounts. I argue that material published in the ILN often relied upon a discourse of witnessing: a discourse that emphasised the presence of its writers in colonial locations and enlisted the reader as protectors of the empire through their reading of first-hand accounts. Not only did Stevenson’s biography help align his text to the dominant ideology of the ILN but the house-style also saw Stevenson’s story literally blend into the surrounding material that frequently comprised imperial testimony. I conclude by reviewing representations of ‘The Bottle Imp’ in biographies of Stevenson and illustrate how frequently his biographers have read this story as evidence of a Samoan belief in magic. I trace these interpretations back to Stevenson’s own representation of the story in a letter to Conan Doyle in 1893 and suggest that these readings perpetuate nineteenth-century cultural assumptions by reproducing Stevenson’s transformation of his South-Seas fiction into ethnography.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;

Dying to Work: American Nationalism and the End of Productive Labour

This chapter reads Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air ([2001] 2010), Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the ... more This chapter reads Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air ([2001] 2010), Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End (2007) and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2012) within the context of the persistent myths of American nationalism. It argues that the dominant ideas about America struggle to survive the form of contemporary office work. Using the idea of productive labour as it emerges from David Graeber’s writing on bullshit jobs, it explores the contrast between the feelings of being productive with the feelings of deathliness that arises from these novels account of contemporary work. It then explores how these novels project the idea of work as death into their depiction of Romantic notions of individualism, showing how these notions struggle to coexist with new, neoliberal, forms of self-sufficiency.

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Liam Connell

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